According to Terry Sullivan, campaign manager for U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, Perry’s chief consultant used similar language in a conference call settling details of the GOP gubernatorial candidates’ first debate, sponsored by KERA.

Sullivan said Carney seemed “unusually excitable” during the call and that when he found out one of the three candidates would have to use a holding room outside the building before the debate, said, “That’s just retarded. This is just retarded. That is the most retarded thing I’ve every heard.”

(Hutchison ended up getting the holding room outside the building, by the way.)

Neither Carney nor Perry campaign spokesman Mark Miner has returned a call or e-mailed request for comment. I’ll update when they do.

Rick Thompson, executive producer of the “Texas Debates,” declined comment, saying there were confidentiality requirements for all pre-debate discussions.

Candidate Debra Medina’s campaign manager, Penny Langford Freeman, said she would honor the request of the call’s host that it be kept confidential.

“I would love to comment, but I’m standing on my honor,” she said. “A confidence is a confidence, and right is right, and wrong is wrong — and disrespect is deplorable. But I still stand on my honor.”

Sullivan said by e-mail, “I was never ever told that the call was supposed to be ‘confidential.'”

Dave Carney said speculation that recent decisions by Perry, including his mandate that middle-school girls be inoculated against a sexually transmitted virus linked to cervical cancer, are designed to raise the governor’s profile nationally is “one of the most retarded things about the political observers in Texas.”